skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My Baby != My Work, My Baby == My Family Member, surely?

Can't we have different standards for discussing the other guy's work and family?

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H. L. Mencken
Never, ever make a free entry question. You'll wind up with "balls", "suck it", etc. all the time. Predefine 3-4 set ranges, and let them perform a single click to answer the question. Much more accurate results.
Android Pioneer HTC Posts Lowest Profit in 6 Years
Adding jQuery Deferred Support to AmplifyJS Request
UK Government relaxes employment law for startups giving equity
Meet the magnetic man: The arrival of the grinders / body hackers
Meet the magnetic man Tim Cannon. He is a body hacker, or grinder by trade.

"What we attempt to do is practical transhumanism – to enhance the human experience."

This is the arrival of the grinders...http://bit.ly/TbrHiC
Bear in mind that far more people will tell you its a good idea than will buy it (usually) so adjust any projections accordingly.

If the time to code the prototype yourself, or the money to outsource the coding, is too much of a risk to take in your personal circumstances, consider finding a technical co-founder to work with to do it. You'll have to give up part of your potential gains, but remember that 50% of something is (usually) better than 100% of nothing.

Edit: also remember that the longer you leave it to do something, the more chance someone else will come along with a similar idea and steal your thunder. Though that may be useful for someone else to test your market for you..!
You can check the courses taught on coursera:

- Algorithms part I
- Algorithms, design and analysis. Part I
- Computer Architecture
- Calculus : single variable
- pre-calculus
- introduction to logic
- introduction to computer networks
I'm self taught and I'm in two minds about this. In one way, these are fundamental questions and, yeah, we should at least know why they're important. However, I can't help feel the binary nature of the questions is a bit like asking a Computer Scientist "Which flag do you set on an Android Intent to make sure an activity only exists at the top of a history stack?" straight off the bat... It favors those who have prepared specifically for the question.

In any case, I guess I have a bit of reading to do..
That's patent nonsense in Belgium as well, true some companies do care. But I've often seen the opposite, they don't care at all what degree you have. They care if you can pass _their_ test. Because obviously they're better at testing people than colleges are.
What is missing:

1) Screenshots
2) Better design of the app
3) Better explanation of what the app does ?

The website looks 2002, and because of 1 and 2 ti doesn't make me want to try the app sorry.
The UK government have been independently testing Huawei gear for years in this centre in the UK, will be interesting to see what they do now in light of this ruling in the US: http://www.zdnet.com/huawei-opens-cybersecurity-testing-cent...
Unremarkable. Of the three, I'd rate SWTOR the highest because (1) crew skills are an interesting mechanic and (2) the sheer overwhelming quantity of effort they put into the story was palpable and very impressive for an MMO. I'd like to see a new MMO borrow the crew skill concept and take it to the next level; it was under-exploited in SWTOR. The story made it enjoyable as a single-player experience, but it was otherwise meh. (I didn't finish any storyline, though I did make progress on all 8. My consular nearly finished, but I quit.)

With Rift, the invasion mechanics feel like something I'd enjoy, but that's probably it. I find myself feeling a bit lost about the mix-n-match class structure, but that is more a lack of research on my part than Trion's fault. The invasion mechanic is probably just like EVE's incursion mechanic. Neither was novel to me, though I had never seen it done in formal phases before. (I have experienced masses of suddenly-spawned enemies in GM-directed waves.)

And in WoW... all I experienced was the 1-20 grind of quest lines and vague storyish backdrop. I didn't have a build worth remarking on or any hint of the endgame, so I'm sure my experience is easily dismissed by people who believe you need to be level 80 before you're fit to judge the game. /shrug

I've never tried Hellgate. I did try out The Secret World for a little, but horror as a genre bores me (existential terror doesn't really do anything for me), and I found it hard to figure out what to do in a lot of cases. I didn't put a lot of effort in it.
Democratic Candidate’s World of Warcraft Hobby Deemed Politically Incorrect
But it's still useful to understand what made them successfull. People do biographical research, write huge biography books, and read them for this exact reason. In the case of Beatles, for example, it is widely believed that it's their time in Hamburg, when they were playing every single day for hours non-stop, that was crucial to their formation as star musicians.
> You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. ...[he never did great work again]

It is a shame that Hamming didn't focus on Bardeen, who shared that Prize (it was for the transistor). Bardeen then went on to win a second prize (for superconductivity.)

Great article though.

BTW: It is worth pointing out that there is a great deal of his wisdom that was very much Bell-Labs culture. A fair amount of that simply does not translate to the startup world.
> 3. Technology matters, but that is only a enabler.

Yes! Just do things with the right tools.
There's also a youtube video of this talk from '95 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
I think I'm going to do some hybrid of this. I'm finding it hard to envisage an MVP. What do I cut back on? The polish/design? Do I just get the fundamental data storage up and running?

The simpler the better in my mind!

If anyone can recommend any teams that have a record of delivering on MVP projects it would be good to know.
I'm not implying that. It might be one reason for the giveaway. But I can think of others, like proving to someone that can actually pay that they're able to connect a country without things blowing up. This might be pretty important in such a market. Or, even simpler, they just want to introduce some kind of vendor lock-in.
MonierLifetile Launches "Smog-Eating" Roofing
PayPal User Agreement changes to require "binding and final arbitration"
I don't know if I would call it a trade war. But the US has never had regular trade with China. China reciprocates by blocking Facebook, YouTube, many Google services, and many other services in the name of 'security'.
damn I didn't know am so lucky for last 35 years or maybe life is different than exams ?
If I were an Apple competitor, I'd forget about tablets and smartphones and invest all my resources into developing the next "big thing". The reason is simple: Apple cannot be beat in its own game.

With this line of thinking we'd have iPhones and Nokia clones.

With the recent upshot in Android tablet-marketshare, I say you dissmiss too easily.
Bootstrapping for One Year: Lessons Learned
> My point: the experiment has been run before.

Good job on having 20k players. I'm impressed your email system was able to handle that.
I dont think its controlling satellites - its twitter...everybody chill
(Dennis Ritchie > Steve Jobs) == (Nikola Tesla > Thomas Edison)
That might be better
He is also asking "Why?", i.e., for a proof[1] to back up your Yes/No answer. Seems like a perfectly good question.

[1] Calculation, if you prefer.
My issue with Malcolm Gladwell, and others like him, is that he distills information down to a thesis that is so easily digestible as to make it seem like commonsense. You don't really think when you read a Malcolm Gladwell book. You just sort of scan it, page by page, your critical and evaluative faculties turned off, and nod your head. It's like the highly refined white flour of insight.

I admire Gladwell the man, and I think he probably has a net-positive impact on most people who read him. But he's highly disappointing for those who want a real spark of insight, or an intellectual exercise. (Also, tangentially speaking, his books are pretty repetitive; most of them could be summed up adequately by a single paragraph, if not a single-sentence logline).

I guess the real question is: are we, the self-described nerds of the article, really better off in a world full of Gladwells? Or were we better off when insight was hard to come by, and you had to go off looking for it? We have a lot more information and insight at our fingertips, but have our critical thinking skills atrophied accordingly? I realize you could take this line of thought a little too far and follow a sort of neo-Luddite vein with it. But that's not my intent. Rather, I'm just asking if all this ready-to-eat insight is actually good for us. I think it's good for the averages, but we probably think of ourselves as being at the margins.
I did this experiment 1 year ago. This was my result back then http://tudormunteanu.com/post/1341815876/a-day-without-color...
I think he's meaning they will actually pay attention to the survey, and then asking questions that aren't as black and white as the one you posed.

Asking particle physicists would they rather have X than Y when both are relevant to their interests would yield better results than asking a butcher particle physics-related questions and dangling a carrot in front of him for clicking through it.
What did Huawei do to become a security threat?

I fail to see how Huawei can be any more of a security threat than companies such as Broadcom or Cisco.

If Huawei has indeed acted in bad faith, then make their actions public so other nations/institutions avoid them. Otherwise, this will (and does) seem like a political/financial play.
What number is halfway between 1 and 9?
Apple is reaping most of the profits (since their devices are high margin)

Why would anyone except Apple and its shareholders care about that? Why would you care about that?

All that should tell you is that you (as an Apple-customer) is getting ripped off.
The release preview isn't intended for upgrades. The final version should work just fine; in fact the final version I got via DreamSpark did exactly that. :)
Shuffle Music the Right Way
5 years from now KickStarter will be known as "The Startup That Failed to Pivot".

The way KickStarter wants to be used and the way the crowd is actually using it have become 2 completely different things. It started out hosting campaigns for plays, short films, & debut albums. Now it's known for its Apple product accessories and tech gadget campaigns. But rather than change its funding structure, rules, and options to accommodate pre-sales of physical products, they've demanded less "risky product campaigns" and more easily deliverable "fun-artsy-fartsy theatre campaigns"... They're basically betraying the very campaigns that put KickStarter on the news and grew it to what it is today.

Over the last few weeks we've learned that KickStarter:

- isn't a store where backers can buy pre-sales.

- doesn't allow "home improvement products".

- doesn't allow you to offer multiple quantities of a reward to your backers.

- and doesn't let you use pre-rendered images of prototypes.

That's the sound of KickStarter shooting itself in the foot 4 times.

Look, I get why they're doing this, they want to protect their backers from successful-but-failed campaigns. But most products FAIL, most companies fail, and the failure rate and shipping delays of projects on KickStarter is normal. I mean Jesus, people are funding, manufacturing, and shipping a product in 6 months. That's pretty incredible. Kickstarter, in their desperate attempt to please the backers, is just going to end up destroying its own ecosystem. Well the tech portion of it.

If the crowd wants to play Mini-Venture-Capitalist then they're going to have to learn to deal with disappointment.

Lastly, Kickstarter doesn't even promote your campaign, it just hosts it. It's up to you to promote your campaign's link. So I'm paying 5% of my funding goal to KickStarter for hosting fees. Why? With Lockitron's successful self-hosted solution we now know that we don't need KickStarter anymore. And not being needed is the first step to obsolescence.
Not precisely answering your question, but I find this "programmer competency matrix" to be a very good guideline of which skills I should try to work on.

http://www.starling-software.com/employment/programmer-compe...
I don't know if they are or not...but I do know that their phones are shit and their support is virtually non-existent.
OK, here is an example. Let's consider 'memcpy'. There are various problems with implementing memcpy in C:

1) You can't assume that pointers are aligned.
2) (related) If the user asks for you to copy n bytes, you better not read byte n+1, even if you don't need it, because maybe it is on a different page which is not available for reading.

So, an optimised memcpy usually first has to do a bit of work to find the 'aligned segment', do that, topped and tailed with some special cases.

A JIT compiler for Javascript (for example) takes issues of alignment out of the hands of the user, so can make any assumptions it wants by keeping such choices away from users.

Of course, we could write a memcpy_aligned (and some systems have such a method), but we can't ever optimise simple memcpy as much as the equivalent in javascript.
> I'd be taking unpaid leave from my day job and getting it done!

If you take the risk, there is an x% chance of success with your new venture. (You fill in x.)

If you continue to work your day job, there is a 100% chance you will continue to work your day job.

I suspect you already know which path you want to take.
Is there an eBook only version?
which is why I won't bother to post to google+

after killing google reader and buzz I just don't trust them anymore and won't put anything of value into their ecosystem.

they should find a way to just support everything forever even if development is killed.
Why do people still support Assange?

1. He is facing sexual assault charges which he needs to answer.

2. He seems a bit crazed worrying about a massive conspiracy theory. He believes that US is the puppet master behind the Swedish charges. I might be wrong but he seems to think the US has pressured Sweden into getting some sex charges against him so they can then extradite him. This seems strange considering that the UK has deported a number of people to the states. People like the TVShack guy or the terror suspect sent a few days ago who hasn't been to states. The later hosted a website on a US server - has never visited the country.

3. He probably does need to face some action regarding his handling of the US cables. He started off doing something which I don't think was terribly wrong. He shone a light on the US behind the scenes in a controlled and sensible way. Then... he released all the cables unredacted endangering countless lives around the world. I don't know if this breaks any laws but I think he needs to be investigated for it.

I think the backers made a mistake backing him. I think him taking flight shows what kind of person he really is. By going to the Ecuador embassy he has traded a trial in Sweden for a comfy prison in London leaving backers thousands of pounds out of pocket.
A forum is basically a multi-user blog with comments. For many cases, that's all you need. If you need something more like vBulletin, then you should probably just use vBulletin.

I can't see anyone coming up with a forum system like what already exists in the PHP world. These things were created when forums were big and have massive man hours of work to build on. To create something like that from scratch today probably wouldn't be worth the effort. If it were worth it, then there would be more available in different ecosystems.
I see a common argument in the comments here. Many of us are saying this is "Computer Science" and not "Software Development". In my opinion, knowledge of the answers to these questions will make you a better software developer. Ofcourse, without knowing any of these, you can still develop software that will work. But if you know answers to these questions (and many other similar computer science questions), you can make smart decisions on how to implement the software you are developing in a more efficient manner.
1. File upload

2. Offline access

File upload is only now coming to iOS6, and wasn't in Android for a long time. It used to be in Windows Mobile, and was apparently pulled last year, IIRC.

Offline access - being able to function properly when no network is around is important for a lot of functionality required by applications. Some of this could be done with browser-side caching, but probably at a performance cost (at the very minimum).
Yes, there's an ebook bundle that includes PDF, ePub and Mobi available here: http://books.filipekberg.se/#ebooks

It's also available on Kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/C-Smorgasbord-ebook/dp/B008Z4TOPK/ref=...
Great comment. But aren't 7 and 8 kinda at odds with each other? I understand that #7 is a bit hyperbole, but still...
>> "cannot be trusted" to be free of influence from Beijing

Unlike U.S. telecoms, which are totally free of influence from Washington.
Excellent question that is difficult to answer. I'll give you a short response here and then write a blog post with example code when I have time. Put your email in your profile and I'll make sure to let you know when that's ready.

A little background: I have gotten many calls when legacy code has a bug or needs a critical enhancement and no one in-house is willing or able to figure it out. I'm no smarter than anyone else, but because I'm stupid and fearless, I often do something that few others attempt: I rewrite or refactor the code first, then work on the bug/enhancement. And the first thing I always do is look for early exits. This has always given me the most bang for my buck in making unintelligible code understandable. The only entry to any function or subroutine should be on the first line and the only exit should be on the last line.

This is never about what runs fastest or produces less lines of code. It's strictly about making life easier for the next programmer.

Early exits can make things really easy (I'll just get out now.) 20 lines of clean code. No problem. Until years later, when that function is 300 lines long, and the next programmer can't figure out what you're doing. Much of the maintenance had been done in emergency mode, each programmer just trying to get in and out as fast as they could.

Early exits make it much easier for bad things to evolve:

- 200 line multiple nested if statements
- 200 line multiple nested recursions
- unidentified but critical "modes" (add/change) (found/notFound)...

Removing early exits forces you to understand what really should be happening and enables you to structure code into smaller, more intelligible pieces.

Short, hand-wavy response, but I hope that helps clarify some. Stay tuned for a better answer...
This is a problem in our industry. These are not "Software Development" questions. These are "Computer Science" questions.
Did you ever need to write an algorithm to process some large volume of data, and you had to make choices related to performance, e.g. to avoid a combinatorial explosion in some searching problem which trivial implementation would be a full cartesian product of several dimensions of data (i.e. a bunch of deeply nested loops)?

Speaking of cartesian product, did you ever wrote a huge database query that you had to optimize through smart usage of join methods, indexing structure, caching (eg materialized views), decisions like subqueries versus joins versus procedural code etc.?

Did you ever had to pick a library collection -- not implement your own hashmap or tree, but just select the ideal implementation -- to allow optimal searches in a given dataset?

If answer='Y' to any of these, then you needed that knowledge, and I guess you do in a regular basis. The thing about CS theory is that it structures and formalizes these problems so they can be precisely analyzed; used as basis for further inventions and improvements; reliably predict the result of some design choice, etc. You have some empirical knowledge of things like computational complexity, but having formal knowledge would often allow to replace hunches with objective certainty, or arrive to the optimal answer to some problems much quicker and more reliably.

At least that's the theory. ;-)
Do they really think they can test for subversive code? Just look at the origin of "trojan". Its designed to look harmless from the outside but contains something deadly on the inside.
Most responsible lower-middle class or poor families can't afford an iPad

That statement makes no sense. Everyone and their grandma can have an iPad. They are being given away for "free", bundled with 3G subscriptions.

Android tablets you actually have to buy.

Where I live, Android-tablets are mostly found among wealthier, informed people.
The devil will be in the detail of the act I suppose.

This presumably assumes that a free market for those shares exists or that a fair method for valuing them is put in place - otherwise it is just an income boost for lawyers.
What is the difference between this and equipment designed by a US firm with manufacturing outsourced to China. It would seem that the same alleged opportunities for subversion would exist.
Yes, number of subset of an empty set is 1, therefore an empty set is not equivalent to nothing.

Thanks for the quote!
I'm self taught and working as a developer. I found these questions almost trivial, I'm genuinely surprised so many developers are having problems with them.
Scratch, a programming language for kids
As far as I understand, the problem with MS was that they tried and used their strength in the OS market to gain an advantage in the browser market. What similar cross-market unfair competition are Facebook, Google and Apple blamed for?
American shopaholics tracked on video by India companies
The best programmer in #8 already did #7. So he never had to write a lot of code to handle poorly structured data. That's why he says, "What's the difference?"
Some combination of your #2 and #3 answer your question. There are people who believe that what Wikileaks was doing was noble and that Assange is the victim of a conspiracy. So, they support him.
> 11. Never use early exits.

As a general piece of advice, this is flat out wrong. Or, to put it more correctly, this is only valid advice when using certain languages and only under certain conditions. Just because it is sound advice in languages with C/C++ derived syntax doesn't mean it should be presented as good advice in general.
First of all, congrats! That's awesome :)

I would follow startup framework and try to think about what an MVP would be just to test and make sure people would really, actually pay for this instead of just taking their word for it. I had a similar situation with my project (matchist) where freelance developers were really excited about the idea, so my partner and I put our heads down, built it and then realized we spent way too much time building and not enough time getting feedback all along the way and making something much much more basic.
Right or wrong, national security has nothing to do with fairness.
I couldn't agree more that is takes time to understand mathematics. Mathematics is akin to riding a bicycle. It looks very difficult at first to someone untrained and unpracticed. Yet the more and more repetition, and getting up after falling down, it gradually becomes easier and a better grasp of the mechanics.

For those wanting to learn mathematics I strongly urge use it everyday in a small way. The preferably way to do that would be to include it in your "work". When you apply the mathematics to the numbers you already know and understand then it becomes clearer over time.